Subscribe

(Reuters) – Few organizations have moved to cloud computing — the delivery of computing as a service from remote centers — and of those that have, many are disappointed with the results, a survey published on Tuesday found.

Fewer than one in five organizations questioned have outsourced the hosting of their applications to cloud computing providers, with two-thirds in early discussions, in trials or not considering a move, said computer security firm Symantec.

Many firms are looking at cloud computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google or Rackspace to help them increase their scale without installing expensive hardware and software locally.

My Take> I’m not surprised by the results of the survey. Security and Data Sovereignty are certainly two of the biggest issues with first generation cloud services. This short Reuters article also touches on other areas of concern I have mentioned in a previous blog about business continuance and disaster recovery.

Adaptation to cloud services still has many challenges and a major re-education of both Enterprise and Corporate Cloud users is still needed. Just because your applications are in the cloud it doesn’t suddenly make them Omni-present.

I’ve seen smaller businesses, corporates, and even some enterprise businesses move to cloud applications including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Gmail, Amazon and SalesForce.com. All services by reputable brands, yet nearly all of the businesses moving to these Cloud services have overestimated the resilience and security of both their own infrastructure and the Cloud provider’s services.

I believe it’s unwise for business to put front office or back office applications in the cloud without looking at the bigger picture. The whole strategy of IT needs to be considered and how to approach corporate security, business continuance, disaster recovery, cloud integration and life cycle management, these among many other factors.

One of the biggest underlying challenges of all these issues is that very few of the cloud services providers are themselves in a position to consult or educate businesses on the full range of considerations for moving to the cloud. Most cloud service providers are only interested in turning businesses into zombie consumers of cloud without regard to the abovementioned.

We are still only at the dawn of the cloud evolution, and as we educate the market how to plan for and move to cloud in 2012, we will see the real evolution and uptake in Cloud 2.0. 😉